Got this about as far as it wanted to go. I probably should have stopped at the pencils. And maybe thrown in something, I dunno, Soviet-ish? Anyway...

Also, it occurs to me far too late that all I've done is put hair on Rasputin from Mignola's Hellboy. I don't know why, but it's been forever since I've done a R/R that I wasn't terribly disappointed in - the idea is there, but my execution of the idea always feels horribly flat and unappealing to me.

@Berserker; I don't think you've failed at any juncture in this. It speaks the concept. As far as story boarding, there's a lot of vital successes across it. I really love how you worked in the technology without it looking too streamlined. Every bit of it looks like it functions.

It does certainly paint the picture, I won't argue that. If it has any REAL flaw, it's just that it's not nearly as dynamic as it could have been - I can see how I could have made it more iconic, AND saved myself a LOT of work/anguish as far as all that detail goes while still conveying as much idea as this does.

Honestly I think I'm just soured on it because I'm still too close to it.

Everyone is doing great stuff, by the way. Hoping to see a lot more submissions from my fellow Whitechapel folk pour in tonight and tomorrow.

"Hasn't the time come for pure intellect to leave its cocoon, the heavy ignorant human mass that stops it from realising its ideal being?"

The character Bakterev in Pavel Perov's Brastvo Viia (The Brotherhood of Viy) is a thinly disguised caricature of Vladimir Bekhterev, the renown Russian neurologist and father of objective psychology, working at the same time and in the same field as Ivan Pavlov, with whom he had an intense rivalry on the subject of conditioned reflexes.

Bekhterev was also something of a mystic, with a belief in psychic energy and telepathy, even after the revolution he was exploring the idea of collective hallucinations and community wide mutual suggestion.

Perov's anti-semitic novel published in Berlin in 1925 hams Bekhterev up into the mad-scientist Bakterev, as a collaborator with the Jews who brought about the Bolshevik Revolution (a common idea, one that was taken and run with by the National Socialists in Germany, though in fact only about 7% of the Bolshevik party were Jewish, including Trotsky amongst others). At the end of the book, Bakterev rebels and shouts at this Jewish conspirators: " What I had to do in the name of science, you do in the name of power". His laboratory explodes and humanity is saved.

For my interpretation I characterised Bakterev as a hero of the October revolution, harnessing the power of the atom to reanimate human souls and place them into half-human half-robot-spiders mortomats. Then it's a case of adding a mix of Soviet and Constructivist imagery, including Vostok rockets and a land-hover Battleship Potemkin. All great fun.

Sorry for the quality, no scanner so I had to rely on my camera. When I think of Russian tech, my guitarist brain screams TUUUUBES!!!! Also: I HAD to go with the Rasputin-ish beard. My girlfriend says it has a Dr.Wily/Robotnik vibe.

new guy here, I know I used the clone tool too much when my wife commented "Why do all those guys look alike"... to which I replied "Er... cause they're clones see?"

This was a brutal piece to do on a limited time frame and I'm still not quite happy with it. If I had more time I'd finish the tubing (for now, just use the power of imagination) that was supposed to link the soul tanks and the mortomat gestation tanks, and possibly add more unique elements to the "guys" as my wife calls them.